Creative Storytelling w/ Rory’s Story Cubes

Storytelling is a lost art-form, especially in schools these days where many faculties leave out the A (Art) in STEAM for STEM.

While policymakers don’t seem to get it, teachers know that the best path to students’ learning is through emotional motivation; and the best way to appeal to emotions is to tell stories that make an impact.

In the review of Comic Life I talked about storytelling as a visual medium. Today I’d like to talk about it as an aural medium.

Rory’s Story Cubes

A number of years ago I first stumbled upon Rory’s Story Cubes and instantly fell in love. As an English as a Second Language teacher my first thought was how much I could engage my students through their own imagination. I bought them on the spot and have carried them as a part of my Teacher’s Kit ever since.

The basic set is a group of nine die, each with a simple icon on each side. The idea is simple: Roll the die and create a story using whichever images are face-up.

Story cubes get your students thinking in ways they never considered and really gets cognitive exploration going.

Now it’s available in your pocket:

Uses in Class

While I love the actual dice, many of us are already carrying around text books, teacher’s guides, lesson plans, computers, and for those of you working with the younger crowd, children. Thus, having access to the cubes in the iPhone you’re already carrying may just save you from toppling over. Let’s take a look at a couple of ways to use the digital cubes in the classroom:

Connect it to a projector – see my tutorial on how to turn your iPad (or iPhone) into a smartboard. With the cubes up on screen at the front of the class, you can have everybody participate in creating a story together, or use them as a prompt for students to create their own ideas individually.

Pass it around – depending on how much you trust the combination between your students with butterfingers and the quality of your case, you can pass the app around and let students work on it in small workstations.

Link it to your lesson – If you’re teaching about the french revolution, how can you incorporate storytelling? Find ways to have your students blend facts about your subject with stories they make up.

Five paragraph essays – After you roll, let the students choose 3 dice to represent three topics they will discuss in a properly formatted essay.

The ideas will continue infinitely, only limited by your own and your students’ imagination.

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Comments

I’ve been researching Rory’s Story Cubes for about a month. As an ESL kindergarten English teacher in China, I am always looking for new, challenging, interesting and fun teaching tools that my students can use. I decided to order the three box set (beginner, actions and voyages) plus the add-on sets of magica, intergalactic, medical, midieval and super powers. I can’t wait to get started using them to see the results I get.